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Falco 0.5.0 now available

Falco 0.5.0 Released

We recently released Falco 0.5.0, the behavioral security monitor. This release has a little bit of everything–new features, rule changes, and bug fixes. Here’s a rundown of the changes:

New Security Monitoring Features

Usually, you’ll want your ruleset to result in few-to-no falco notifications. However, it’s possible that the ruleset could be noisy in new environments. We made a couple of changes to mitigate the impact of a flood of notifications:

Falco now caches output formatting objects so they are not recreated for every notification.

Notifications are now throttled by a token bucket that enforces an average rate (notifications/second) as well as allowing for temporary bursts above the average rate.

There are some other new features:

Falco can now record statistics on event processing to a file, via the -s <statistics file> option. This allows you to monitor the stream of events from the kernel module to ensure none are dropped.

In some cases, you may want to run Falco in a container without explicitly building/loading the kernel module. You can use the SYSDIG_SKIP_LOAD environment variable in the docker run command will skip those steps and assume the driver is already loaded.

The verbosity of Falco’s log messages can now be controlled via the log_levels configuration option.

Falco Rule Changes

The ruleset has several changes to reduce noisiness:

dnf has been added to the list of package management programs.

fail2ban-server and apt/apt-get have been added as programs that can spawn shells.

systemd has been added as a program that can access sensitive files.

google_containers/kube-proxy has been added as a trusted image.

Bug Fixes

There are also a few bug fixes:

Prior to 0.5.0, if your rule had a malformed output field, you wouldn’t know about it until a rule actually triggered and tried to use the field. Now, all output fields are validated at load time.

If you were building from source and tried to provide your own third-party libraries, you’d see that the USE_BUNDLED_DEPS cmake option wasn’t working. This has been fixed.

We updated the download links in our installer scripts to solely use https.